There are going to be some major changes to the North American shard structure starting this Wednesday, October 24th. Similar to what happened months ago with the European shards, a number of NA shards are going to be made trial-only: Briarcliff, Byriel, Deepstrike, Gnarlwood, Greenscale, Keenblade, Millrush, and Silkweb. Players on these shards will be able to utilize RIFT’s free transfer system to transfer their characters and guilds to more populated shards.
Thanks to Trion’s server tech advancements, all remaining NA shards will also be placed in the same wargroup, allowing us to have a larger stock of players for warfront and dungeon queues.
Keep reading for the full announcement, which was made by Elrar yesterday evening on the official forums, as well as a followup post regarding guild transfers, trial players, and transfer level requirements.
Originally posted by Elrar (Source)
The servers of Storm Legion have arrived early! Since the beginning of the year we’ve been making constant advancements in our server technology as we worked to bring all of the shards closer together. Starting with European servers in July, we began our plans to have everyone in each region play on a single wargroup. Now we’re able to start the next leap forward – further focusing on removing the barriers between shards.The advancements we’ve made this year have effectively doubled the capacity of the individual servers allowing more of you to play together than ever before while reducing the total number of shards we need to support RIFT’s active population.
What this means for you – we can now support all of our North American players on a single wargroup, further reducing queue times for dungeons and PvP while bringing the community even closer together.
This change is currently scheduled to occur this Wednesday, October 24. Here’s what the new mega-wargroup for North America will look like:
- Deepwood
- Faeblight (RP)
- Greybriar
- Laethys (Oceanic)
- Seastone (PvP)
- Shatterbone
- Threesprings
- Wolfsbane
Briarcliff, Byriel, Deepstrike, Gnarlwood, Greenscale, Keenblade, Millrush, and Silkweb will be converted to trial-only shards – everyone currently on these shards will be able to take advantage of the Free Character Transfers to find yourself a new home or meet up with guild mates. You can find full instructions on how to transfer your characters & guilds here: Trion Support Center – Character Transfers
Sub-forums for the new trial shards will be archived for your reference.
With this massive increase in server capacity it will be easier than ever to enjoy RIFT to the fullest. We’ll be ready for anything as you and your friends storm our shores with the release of our first expansion – we can’t wait!
And here’s some additional information:
Originally posted by Elrar (Source)
- As far as Transfer restrictions go, they’re all removed once the shard is flagged “Trial-Only” on Wednesday. This includes trials, low level alts, etc.- Guild Transfers: sorry those weren’t included, I”ll see if we can get that updated! Fortunately, it’s straight forward:
- As the guild leader/officers you’ll want to empty out the vault.
- Once you’re ready to transfer both your guild and character just hit the transfer tool at character select.
- As a guild leader it will automatically prompt you to transfer your guild during the Character transfer process. Also, I’d recommend making an alt an officer/leader otherwise it will automatically pass to the next most senior member.
